[D66] 665: Calculating the Lesser Evil

[J.N.]

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2547-665-calculating-the-lesser-evil

665: Calculating the Lesser Evil

By Eyal Weizman / 06 April 2016

Following the recent escalation and justification of US drone strikes in
the name of national security, Eval Weizman reminds us how the demand
for calculation paves the way for a continued justification of violence.
The following excerpt from his book charts the philosophical
underpinnings of Western military and humanitarian intervention from the
late twentieth century to the present.


I.

If, as a friend recently suggested, we ought to construct a monument to
our present political culture as an homage to the principle of the
‘lesser evil’, it should be made in the form of the digits 6-6-5 built
of concrete blocks, and installed like the Hollywood sign on hillsides
or other high points overlooking city centers. This number, one less
than the number of the beast — that of the devil and of total evil —
might capture the essence of our humanitarian present obsessed with the
calculations and calibrations that seek to moderate, ever so slightly,
the evils that it has largely caused itself.

The principle of the lesser evil is often presented as a dilemma between
two or more bad choices in situations where available options are, or
seem to be, limited. The choice made justifies the pursuit of harmful
actions that would be otherwise deemed unacceptable in the hope of
averting even greater suffering. Sometimes the principle is presented as
the optimal result of a general field of calculations that seeks to
compare, measure and evaluate different bad consequences in relation to
necessary acts, and then to minimize those consequences. Both aspects of
the principle are understood as taking place within a closed system in
which those posing the dilemma, the options available for choice, the
factors to be calculated and the very parameters of calculation are
unchallenged. Each calculation is undertaken anew, as if the previous
accumulation of events has not taken place, and the future implications
are out of bounds.

Those who seek to justify necessary evils as ‘lesser’ ones, especially
when searching for a rationale to explain recent wars and military
expeditions, like to appeal to the work of the fourth-century North
African philosopher—theologian St Augustine. Augustine’s rejection of
the principle of Manichaeism — a world divided into equally powerful
good and evil — meant that he no longer saw evil as the perfect mirror
image of the good; rather, in platonic terms, as a measure of its
absence. Since evil, unlike good, is not perfect and absolute, it is
forever measured and calibrated on a differential scale of more and
less, greater and lesser. Augustine taught that it is not permissible to
practice lesser evils, because to do so violates the Pauline principle
‘do no evil that good may come’. But — and here lies its appeal — lesser
evils might be tolerated when they are deemed necessary and unavoidable,
or when perpetrating an evil results in the reduction of the overall
amount of evil in the world.

In relation to the ‘war on terror’, the terms of the lesser evil were
most clearly and prominently articulated by former human rights scholar
and leader of Canada’s Liberal Party Michael Ignatieff. In his book The
Lesser Evil, Ignatieff suggested that in ‘balancing liberty against
security’ liberal states establish mechanisms to regulate the breach of
some human rights and legal norms, and allow their security services to
engage in forms of extrajuridical violence — which he saw as lesser
evils — in order to fend off or minimize potential greater evils, such
as terror attacks on civilians of western states. If governments need to
violate rights in a terrorist emergency, this should be done, he
thought, only as an exception and according to a process of adversarial
scrutiny. ‘Exceptions’, Ignatieff states, ‘do not destroy the rule but
save it, provided that they are temporary, publicly justified, and
deployed as a last resort.’  The lesser evil emerges here as a pragmatic
compromise, a ‘tolerated sin’ that functions as the very justification
for the notion of exception. State violence in this model takes part in
a necro-economy in which various types of destructive measure are
weighed in a utilitarian fashion, not only in relation to the damage
they produce, but to the harm they purportedly prevent and even in
relation to the more brutal measures they may help restrain. In this
logic, the problem of contemporary state violence resembles indeed an
all-too-human version of the mathematical minimum problem of the divine
calculations previously mentioned, one tasked with determining the
smallest level of violence necessary to avert the greatest harm. For the
architects of contemporary war this balance is trapped between two
poles: keeping violence at a low enough level to limit civilian
suffering, and at a level high enough to bring a decisive end to the war
and bring peace.

More recent works by legal scholars and legal advisers to states and
militaries have sought to extend the inherent elasticity of the system
of legal exception proposed by Ignatieff into ways of rewriting the laws
of armed conflict themselves.  Lesser evil arguments are now used to
defend anything from targeted assassinations and mercy killings, house
demolitions, deportation, torture, to the use of (sometimes) non-lethal
chemical weapons, the use of human shields, and even ‘the intentional
targeting of some civilians if it could save more innocent lives than
they cost.’ In one of its more macabre moments it was suggested that the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima might also be tolerated under the defense
of the lesser evil. Faced with a humanitarian A-bomb, one might wonder
what, in fact, might come under the definition of a greater evil.
Perhaps it is time for the differential accounting of the lesser evil to
replace the mechanical bureaucracy of the ‘banality of evil’ as the
idiom to describe the most extreme manifestations of violence. Indeed,
it is through this use of the lesser evil that societies that see
themselves as democratic can maintain regimes of occupation and
neo-colonization.